Rewriting the Old Testament in Anglo-Saxon Verse: Becoming the Chosen People
Ebook
The Bible played a crucial role in shaping Anglo-Saxon national and cultural identity. However, access to Biblical texts was necessarily limited to very few individuals in Medieval England. In this book, Samantha Zacher explores how the very earliest English Biblical poetry creatively adapted, commented on and spread Biblical narratives and traditions to the wider population. Systematically surveying the manuscripts of surviving poems, the book shows how these vernacular poets commemorated the Hebrews as God's 'chosen people' and claimed the inheritance of that status for Anglo-Saxon England. Drawing on contemporary translation theory, the book undertakes close readings of the poems Exodus, Daniel and Judith in order to examine their methods of adaptation for their particular theologico-political circumstances and the way they portray and problematize Judaeo-Christian religious identities.
Through innovative close-readings of surviving manuscripts, this book explores how early Anglo-Saxon poetry adapted Biblical narratives to construct and disseminate a coherent Anglo-Saxon cultural identity.
Draws on contemporary translation theory in close readings of the poems Exodus, Daniel and Judith.
Examines the central role of these poems in constructing a unified Anglo-Saxon political identity.
Explores how Anglo-Saxon poetry adapted Old Testament narratives and traditions for its own contexts.
Introduction: The Bible as Literature in Anglo-Saxon England \ 1. Reading and Rewriting the Bible in Anglo-Saxon England \ 2. Reconstructing the Ethnogenetic Myths of the Hebrews in Exodus \ 3. Daniel and the Theme of translatio electionis \ 4. Reading Religious, Racial, and Ethnic Difference in Judith \ 5. Conclusion \ Bibliography \ Index.
In Rewriting the Old Testament in Anglo-Saxon Verse, Samantha Zacher brilliantly reasserts the centrality and importance of retellings of ancient Jewish history in the Old English poetic tradition, and almost casually offers dramatic new insights into three poems, namely Exodus, Daniel, and Judith, that all deserve to be better read, and have never yet been read so well. This is a deeply thoughtful and thought-provoking book, well worthy of its wise and witty author: elegant, perceptive, savvy, and full of poise and grace; I only wish it were mine!
As deeply learned as it is readily accessible, Rewriting the Old Testament in Anglo-Saxon Verse sheds significant new light on the large and important area of the Old English poetic corpus. Readers new to the period will find it an excellent introduction not only to the period's religious poetry but to the culture that produced it, and specialist readers will find their understanding of the texts Zacher examines deepened, and frequently challenged, by the fresh insights and new perspectives she offers throughout.
Insightful and accessible. … Zacher should be congratulated for inviting an audience beyond the realm of specialists to a renewed literary, theoretical, and cultural engagement with Old English biblical poems.
By taking a renewed look at the Old English poems Exodus, Daniel, and Judith, Zacher provides significant new ways of reading Anglo-Saxon literature contextually and theoretically. In each chapter, she reaches beyond direct Biblical sources to understand the conceptual apparatus that Anglo-Saxon poets had at their disposal in composing these adaptational translations.
- Title: Rewriting the Old Testament in Anglo-Saxon Verse: Becoming the Chosen People
- Author: Samantha Zacher
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
- Print Publication Date: 2013
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781441150936, 9781441185600, 1441185607, 1441150935
- Resource ID: LLS:9781441150936
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2024-04-09T09:32:10Z
Samantha Zacher is Associate Professor of English at Cornell University, USA. She is the author of Preaching the Converted: the Style and Rhetoric of the Vercelli Book Homilies (2009), and co-editor with Andy Orchard of New Readings in the Vercelli Book (2009).